August 3, 2018

New York Times Defends Sarah Jeong

Many on the left are dismissing the outcry over Jeong as disingenuous, and do not think the Times should have responded.

The right condemns Jeong’s tweets as racist and sees an anti-conservative double-standard in the Times’ response, but generally does not believe she

or anyone else

should be fired for tweets written years ago.

“From cries about ‘ethics in journalism’ to ‘fake news,’ journalists have been increasingly targeted by people acting in bad faith who do not care about the work they do, the challenges they face, or the actual context of their statements. Online trolls and harassers want us, the Times, and other newsrooms to waste our time by debating their malicious agenda... The strategy is to divide and conquer by forcing newsrooms to disavow their colleagues one at a time. This is not a good-faith conversation; it’s intimidation.”

“The newspaper’s response about its new staffer will only help fuel the sort of faux-outrage campaigns the trolls are waging... [They] have been orchestrating outrage campaigns to harass, intimidate and discredit journalists and their work in the hopes of getting them fired. The Times, at least this time, didn’t go that far. But this will keep happening, there and beyond... nobody is a better friend to a right-wing berserker campaign than a terrified executive at a respectable news outlet who still doesn’t understand the modern internet.”

Huffington Post

“This controversy was purposely constructed to rankle and cause a commotion; the trolls simply wanted the gratification of seeing a supposed liberal-leaning publication flinch—and respond to a small but loud minority. What these critics wanted was not for Jeong to atone for her words, but for the journalistic establishment to acknowledge their power. And that’s precisely what the Times did.”

Fast Company

The right condemns Jeong’s tweets as racist and sees an anti-conservative double-standard in the Times’ response, but generally does not believe she

“The Times promotes not only a double standard, but a double standard in which people on one side are likened to Nazis and Hitler, but people on the other, doing the precisely same things but aimed at a PC-disapproved group instead of a PC-favored one, receive positions of high cultural leadership and prominence.”

“If we've learned anything from the last few years, the capacity for outrage on the left and right is near infinite. There's nothing wrong with forcefully expressing disagreement, but the constant hunt for scalps will leave everyone bald and bloodied... if [newspapers] do hire someone, they should stand by their decision until the new employee does something worthy of firing while employed by them, not because a mob chooses to weaponize something they said in the past.”